GENETICS × TECHNOLOGY

The Human Genome

2001 to 2022 CE

Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Quaternary · Holocene · Meghalayan

Three billion letters, read first in draft by a public consortium and a private company racing each other, and declared finished in 2003. Eight per cent of it was in fact still missing: long stretches of repeated sequence that short reads could not cross, because a repeat looks the same wherever you land in it. Reading them took a technology that reads long pieces whole, and the gaps closed only in 2022.

Why it matters

It made our own species readable, and turned the distance between us and any other genome into a measurable quantity. The nineteen-year tail is the part usually left out, and it is the interesting part: the easy ninety-two per cent took a decade, and the awkward eight took two more.

Dating & uncertainty

Two drafts appeared in 2001, a public consortium and a private company, and the project was declared finished in 2003. Eight percent of the sequence was in fact missing, and the gaps were only closed in 2022.

Sources

1. International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium (2001), Nature · Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome
2. Venter et al. (2001), Science · The sequence of the human genome
3. Nurk et al. (2022), Science · The complete sequence of a human genome

Earth history as one day

23:59:59.9995476 µs before midnight

if Earth’s 4.54 billion years were compressed into a single day